The Inferno

An extraordinary new verse translation of Dante’s masterpiece, by poet, scholar, and lauded translator Anthony Esolen

Of the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. In theInferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem’s line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding anInfernothat will be as popular with general readers as with teachers and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art.

Esolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante’s most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians—that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.

Acerca do autor (2002)

Anthony Esolenis a professor of English at Providence College. He is a published poet who has written numerous scholarly articles on Renaissance and medieval literature. He is the author ofPeppers, a book of poetry, and his translations include Lucretius’sDe rerum naturaand Torquato Tasso’sGerusalemme liberata.

Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose masterpieceThe Divine Comedyhas exerted a profound influence on Western thought, was born in Florence in May 1265. He entered public life in 1295, later becoming one of the six governing magistrates of Florence. He repeatedly opposed the machinations of Pope Boniface VIII, who was attempting to place all of Tuscany under Papal control, and in 1301 was banished from Florence on trumped-up charges. Dante would never enter his native city again, spending his remaining years with a series of patrons in various courts in Italy. He completedThe Divine Comedyshortly before his death in September 1321.